Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:00:00 · Jenny Wen, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:00:00] S0: This design process that designers have been taught, we sort of treat it as gospel. That's basically dead. You as a designer actually do not have the time to make these beautiful mocks anymore. [00:00:10] S1: A big part of the design role now is helping engineers and teams execute, not just telling them, "Here's the design." [00:00:15] S0: A few years ago, 60 to 70% of it was mocking and prototyping, but now I feel the mocking up part of it is 30 to 40%. [00:00:23] S1: You're better off not blocking that, letting them cook. [00:00:26] S0: It's not just designers who are feeling like, "Oh yeah, we have to keep up with engineers." I think even engineers are like, "How do we keep up with ourselves?" [00:00:32] S1: How to keep up with all our agents, our seven agents who are constantly running? [00:00:35] S0: The result of engineering changing a bunch is that design is sort of forced to change. We used to go off and make this two-year, five-year, 10-year vision even. Now it becomes a vision that's three to six months out, and isn't necessarily creating this beautiful deck, sometimes just creating a prototype that points people in the right direction. [00:00:52] S1: Boris on the podcast recently was saying Claude Code is now helping him come up with ideas. [00:00:55] S0: And we'll get better at taste and judgment and design. We might be holding onto that a little bit too much. [00:01:01] S1: Where will human brains continue to be valuable?
00:01:01 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jenny Wen
[00:01:01] S1: Where will human brains continue to be valuable? [00:01:03] S0: At the end of the day, someone has to decide what is actually going to get built and what actually matters. Someone still needs to be accountable for the decision. [00:01:10] S1: What do you now look for when you're hiring designers? [00:01:13] S0: There's probably three archetypes of folks that are really interesting to me right now. [00:01:20] S1: Today's guest is Jenny Wen. Jenny was head of design for Claude, is now leading design for Claude Cowork. Prior to that, she was director of design at Figma, where she led the design teams behind FigJam and Slides. She was also a designer at Dropbox and Square and Shopify. And what I love about this conversation is that Jenny is living in the future of where design as a profession is heading, and she's here to give us a glimpse into what that looks like, and how much things are going to be changing for designers. It is pretty wild and extremely interesting. A huge thank you to Noah Levin and Emily Lynn Hasham for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation. Don't forget to check out Lennysproductpass.com for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. Let's get into it after a short word from our wonderful sponsors. [00:04:21] S0: Yeah, excited to be here.
00:04:21 · Jenny Wen, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:04:21] S0: Yeah, excited to be here. [00:04:22] S1: I've been looking forward to this conversation because I spend a lot of time on this podcast talking about the future of software engineering, how much that role is changing, the role of product management, how much that role is changing. I even spent a lot of time on how design is changing. Clearly, it is also changing in a really big way. And you have such a front row seat to where things are heading. I also know you have a lot of very strong opinions about where things are heading, so there's a lot of stuff I want to talk about. I want to just start with just this broad question. How is the design process changing with the rise of AI?
00:04:59 · Jenny Wen
[00:04:59] S0: It's changing a lot. I think it's still also got a long way to go in terms of the way it's changing. I think we've actually seen engineering change a lot more in the past little while than design actually has, but I think the result of engineering changing a bunch is that design is sort of forced to change. And so I think some context around this, is I did a talk at a conference in Berlin a few months ago in September, and I called it Don't Trust the Design Process, where I basically just said, "Hey, you know this design process that designers have been taught, where you go and you go off and you do a bunch of research and discovery, and then you diverge, you converge, diverge, converge." And it's like this process that we sort of treated as gospel and tried so hard to preserve and we were like, "Trust the process." That's basically dead. I think it was sort of dying before the age of AI, but given now that engineers can go off and spin off their seven Claudes, I think as designers, we really have to let go of that process. And I think that's the big thing that's changing. But I think even in the past three to four months since I did that talk, that talk actually starts to feel pretty ... It kind of feels outdated to me, which is a little embarrassing, but especially with the big shift of Opus 46 and a bunch of folks just really discovering and using Claude Code over the holiday break, I think we're seeing this force to change our process happen even more. The way I see it now is there are basically two types of design work, and design work is becoming really stratified in this new world. So there's the first one, which is really just supporting the implementation and execution. So this is the one where engineers are using their seven Claudes to create all these features, and anybody can put an idea out there, and you can just talk about an idea and somebody, usually actually an engineer because they're still better at implementing this stuff than we are, they will just make a scrappy version of it and you can try it out. And you as a designer actually do not have the time to make these beautiful mocks anymore, or to lead in this way. And then I think there's the second kind of work that feels also really important, which is creating the sort of vision or direction for things.
00:07:18 · Jenny Wen
This one feels like the hardest to make time for, and it's one that we still did before, but I think the shape of it's very much changing, because I think we used to go off and say, "We're going to do this design vision. We're going to go off and make this two-year, five-year, whatever, 10-year vision even, and we're going to point us towards something." But the way that the technology is changing now, we don't know what's going to happen in two years. There's too much changing, and it usually becomes a vision that's three to six months out, and isn't necessarily something that is creating this beautiful deck that's beautifully story told. It's sometimes just creating a prototype that points people in the right direction. And I think this kind of work is still really important in this world because in a world where people can spin off their seven Claudes, make whatever features they want in any kind of direction or in implementation, you need to point them towards something. And in order to make sure that we're all making something that makes sense together and is also done in a way where it's efficient. If we're all working towards something that has one greater cause, it's much more efficient to do that than just random things. And so that's the big shift that I'm seeing. And I think I have opinions about it now, but ask me in three months and it might actually change even more.
00:08:43 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jenny Wen
[00:08:43] S1: So what you're saying here is it's not like you or the design field is like, "We need to change?" It's engineering and the fact that you can build so quickly, just forces the role of a designer to change because as you said, engineers can just ship, ship, ship, ship, ship. And what you're finding here is you're better off not blocking that, letting them cook, as they say. And then there's this mode of helping them along as they ship, bring it together, make sure it all connects, guide them a little bit. [00:09:15] S0: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I don't think there is one unifying voice that's like, "Designers, we need to change right now." But yeah, there is the follow-on effects of engineering tooling really changing. I think we'll probably see design tooling change in this next year or so as well, but a lot of it right now is trailing that. And I think it's also really empowering for us too, because as designers, we also now have access to a lot of these coding tools. And we can be a part of the process in a way where we're implementing stuff. I'm doing a lot of last mile stuff where I'm implementing all the polish, and working with engineers really closely to get the feature across the line, and also prototype stuff in actual code as opposed to relying on engineers to do that again.